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Leave No War Behind

Probably no group of intellectuals has had a greater impact on American politics over the last four decades than the neoconservatives. The Rolling Stones even sang a song about them. Yet who or what exactly is a neoconservative? Over the years the meaning of the word has changed. Initially it referred to a coterie of liberals and leftists, absorbed in domestic policy issues, who raised questions about the efficacy of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in the mid-1960s. Today, neoconservatives seem restricted for the most part to the Republican Party and are advocates of a muscular foreign policy. Irving Kristol, who once described himself as a liberal “mugged by reality,” was one kind of neoconservative. His son, William, a lifelong Republican, is an entirely different kind.

This definitional question, and in particular neoconservatism’s extraordinary transformation, is the principal subject of “Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement,” by Justin Vaïsse, a French expert on American foreign policy who is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the contours of our recent political past. Vaïsse is a historian of ideas. “Neoconservatism” demonstrates, among other things, that ideas really do make a difference in our lives.

Vaïsse defines neoconservatism by disassembling it. He sees three “ages” to the movement. The first began in the mid-1960s with intellectuals like Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer gathering around Kristol and Bell’s new magazine, The Public Interest, and also around Commentary, under its editor Norman Podhoretz. At the time, all of these writers were sympathetic in principle to an activist government, especially when it came to the economy, but questioned the expectations of Great Society planners of antipoverty and related social programs — or, in Saul Bellow’s phrase, the Good Intentions Paving Company. Challenging what they saw as liberal overreaching and wishful thinking with hard, often crushing, empirical facts, these early neoconservatives were, in a sense, the skeptical conscience of liberalism.

But skepticism about the effectiveness of particular programs soon mutated into broader disenchantment with almost every kind of government intervention and into the conviction that the free market alone offered acceptable solutions to social problems. As neoconservative pragmatism calcified into laissez-faire dogma, some of its godfathers defected. Daniel Bell, a self-described “right-wing social democrat,” for one; Moynihan, who, ­Vaïsse writes, “contended that he was the modern incarnation of a Wilsonian Progressive,” for another. By the time President Ronald Reagan proclaimed “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” neoconservatism was a spent force in domestic policy, hardly distinguishable from the libertarianism of the American Enterprise Institute.

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Illustration by Matt Dorfman

In the second and third ages, as Vaïsse describes them, neoconservatives turned their attention to foreign policy. This wasn’t surprising. The original neoconservatives were devout anti-Communists for whom opposition to Stalinism and the Soviet Union was as much a left-wing as a right-wing position. This is why the neoconservatives of the second age reacted against what Vaïsse calls “the conquest of the Democratic Party by the forces of the New Left,” begun in 1968 and completed in 1972, when George McGovern won the presidential nomination. The McGovern­ites, strenuously opposed to the Vietnam War and distrustful of American power, struck more hawkish Democrats as ­naïve about Communism, even isolationist. The neocons rallied behind Henry Jackson, known as Scoop, a Democratic senator from Washington who, though a supporter of the Great Society’s domestic programs, was the most unrepentant of cold warriors. He nurtured the careers of many young men later known as the toughest of the tough-minded — Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams and Douglas Feith.

Second-age neoconservatives formed the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, an organization established for the explicit purpose of winning back the Democratic Party from the McGovernites. ­Vaïsse skillfully delineates the maneuvers of the C.D.M. — including the recruitment of party regulars, labor leaders and disenchanted leftists — along with those of its successor organization, the nonpartisan but intensely hawkish Committee on the Present Danger. (Vaïsse also notes that the C.D.M. gave rise to another organization, the Democratic Leadership Council, which in turn gave rise to Bill Clinton.) After Jackson, who had all the charisma of a Northwestern spruce, failed to win the 1976 presidential nomination, many members of the C.D.M. began looking elsewhere.

Vaïsse’s third age, which runs from the Reagan presidency to the present, includes not only neoconservative refugees from the Democratic Party but also a new generation, like the younger Kristol, who came of age within the Republican Party. And Vaïsse’s story of this period is much like his earlier story: the deterioration of a perspective grounded in the reality of the cold war and the threat posed by the Soviet Union into a rigidly hawkish ideology, along with the peeling off of prominent defectors, like Francis Fukuyama.

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Vaïsse’s narrative is especially critical of the third-age neoconservatives, whom he depicts as arrogant, alarmist and intellectually lazy. The people so described might point out that these are hardly disinterested judgments since they come from a fellow at the Brookings Institution, which Vaïsse acknowledges is a rival to the American Enterprise Institute, home of many neoconservatives. And it is true that Vaïsse’s opinions sometimes get the better of him. He says, for example, that the invasion of Iraq under the second Bush “did nothing” to forestall nuclear proliferation, though it is not at all obvious that the world would be a safer place at the moment if Saddam Hussein were still in a position to restart his nuclear program and engage in an arms race with the mullahs of Iran. Generally, however, Vaïsse draws on the facts to support his argument that neoconservatism has become doctrinaire and tiresomely predictable.

There seems to be no war neoconservatives won’t eagerly fight, no arms program they won’t happily support. Reagan wasn’t combative enough for them, and even as the Soviet Union was collapsing, neocons were warning of a growing Russian menace. Before 9/11 redirected their attention to the Middle East, they were urging a confrontation with China. They remain suspicious of diplomacy, with its penchant for negotiation, compromise and the half loaf — who needs a State Department? “For neoconservatives,” Vaïsse writes, “there was no threat that could not be handled with a larger military budget, more patriotism and a few victorious foreign interventions.” They have learned the lesson of Munich, perhaps, but not of the Cuban missile crisis. Devastatingly, Vaïsse points out that “neoconservatives have not allowed a year to go by since 1972 without calling for an increase in the defense budget.”

The central question about neoconservatism these days is whether the term retains any content at all. When knowledgeable journalists can refer to that arch-paleoconservative, William F. Buckley Jr., as a neoconservative, it may be time to consign the label to history. Vaïsse struggles to distinguish the neoconservatives of the third age from what some have called “assertive nationalists” like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, but he seems to be arguing for a distinction without a difference. Today, individuals identified as neoconservatives can be heard calling for the bombing of Iran, for expanding NATO into Ukraine and Georgia, and for unquestioning fealty to Israeli hard-liners. There is nothing particularly “neoconservative” about these positions. They are simply the views of the most unwaveringly hawkish of America’s hawks.